Comment by vmception | Hacker News Reader

Comment by vmception | Hacker News Reader

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> It otherwise looked like any other penny asset.

Before 3 years ago, it wouldn't have looked like "any other penny asset" it would have had a similar chart as now because its prior booms and busts 3 years prior to that all had similar degrees of amplitude. Just zoom in on a chart and pretend that it is summer 2017 with no future price history available, just like all the traders at the time had.

Regarding "penny asset" again, in price 3 years ago and 6 years ago Bitcoin would have been hundreds of dollars, which is not like penny assets, and even if comparing "penny stocks" to a digital commodity the marketcap of bitcoin 3 even 6 years ago would be greater than 99.9% of anything in the penny stock markets (bulletin boards, pink sheets), of which - of course - commodities and commodities derivative do not trade on.

You speak in hyperbole for emphasis and that's generally fine, but that only works if you know what you are talking about and it is pretty clear you just conflate concepts over and over again.

Its fine if you personally don't want to or don't have the risk profile to be in this market, yes you are missing a lot of alpha from sitting on the sidelines. No, you don't have any insight to support you sitting on the sidelines. But again, it is a completely valid choice to do so.

You’re seeking some deeper meaning here than one that exists.

It’s supposed to be a currency. And yet it’s not. It doesn’t exhibit any of the traits of a currency I’d want to spend at least. Maybe you’re OK with that, so have fun. It’s fundamental existence doesn’t work for me.

> It’s supposed to be a currency. And yet it’s not. It doesn’t exhibit any of the traits of a currency I’d want to spend at least.

ah that argument, I read that recently, those are skeumorphs, here is a quote

> When it comes to this asset class, there are still people that argue against the concept of Bitcoin, mostly in reaction to one of its sales pitches without ever noticing what this really is. For example, people are likely to debate about the “coin” or “currency” nomenclature of “bitcoin” and “cryptocurrency” respectively. Ultimately, what we have is an asset with a fixed known supply, which has some attributes of all other asset classes, some improvements, is continually updated to have more attributes and improvements, in a world with massive inflation. This is the macro story of bitcoin, the big picture.

You might begin to notice that I use the term "digital asset" and "crypto" in its new asset-based context very reliably. It can be transferred peer to peer and I frequently do that, I don't use the term currency and I typically don't single bitcoin out specifically as I'm not usually talking about bitcoin specifically.

The creator was trying to make “electronic cash” that evaded central banking manipulation from what I can tell.

Except there’s a fixed supply. There isn’t a fixed supply of value in the world.

That is correct, there are a lot of things as well as incomplete features in the first versions of bitcoin that were deprecated by the open source community, some of it while in ongoing communication with Satoshi Nakamoto. One of the strengths of this asset class is that it has no static limitations, while any improvements to its core concept must reach overwhelming consensus otherwise it debilitates the entire system.

The amendment ratification process has a long lead time, even when it is not politicized. The current Taproot and Schnoor amendments actually improve the "electronic cash" feature set, and has signaling consensus already but they must signal for I think 6-12 months before the nodes start updating their software. Hopefully wallets and exchanges use this time to implement the technology as default for the users (but they won't, human nature)

This doesn't mean anything, you need to make an argument as to why you believe that for an asset to be successful as a currency, its number of units needs to expand or contract in relation to value being produced.

It's a "fixed supply" of something that's very divisible. The media loves the fixed supply narrative, but it's really not important. Other coins have permanently inflating supplies and their charts mostly match the bitcoin chart.

The real gift of bitcoin is that it jump-started a wave of innovation by birthing "cryptocurrency". Once people saw that money would flow into bitcoin, people started new projects to try out all the other now-obvious ideas for cryptocurrencies. People want to build important things.

If you're thinking of bitcoin in the mindset of beanie babies or building a better credit card, then you may have missed the bigger thing that's happening. It's becoming obvious, to me at least, that cryptocurrency is trending in a direction where it will profoundly disrupt any industry that uses the internet, beginning with finance.

Also, I've been following this thread, and you should probably re-read all of vmception's comments. IMO he's right about some important stuff that your replies suggest you may be missing.

Currency is just a vehicle for the transfer of value. What traits should a currency have?

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